In the two decades since the publication of his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer has produced a body of work so influential that for most people he is the first name that comes to mind when they think of travel writing. Born in England to parents from India, brought up in California, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and now for many years a resident of Japan, Iyer personifies the vast revolution in the self-image of much of humanity in the last 50 years. Increasingly, our cultural allegiances are multiple, the reach and frequency of our journeys wider, our relationship to the word “home” drastically different. And to understand the new self within this new globalism, thousands of readers have turned to Iyer. His new book, The Open Road, a biography of the Dalai Lama, appeared this summer. In this interview, Iyer talks about the book, travel writing in general, what he admires about Marcel Proust and musician Leonard Cohen, and about Indians and travel. Edited excerpts:
Your new book on the Dalai Lama has many interesting insights on religion, politics, globalism, and on the balancing act of upholding tradition while embracing change. Am I correct in my understanding that these are as much the themes of your own work as they are of the Dalai Lama’s life?
Tibet is the main backdrop of his latest book on the Dalai Lama (Photo by: Teh Eng Koon / AFP)
One major theme of the book is projection—the way in which we all create the Dalai Lama that we need or want—and I am sure that I am as guilty of that as any other. So inevitably, I see him in relation to certain themes of cross-cultural fascination, of exile and home and globalism, that have always been close to my interests (while trying, I hope, to acknowledge, at many points, that he is infinitely richer and larger than my tiny notions of him). And in approaching a figure on whom so much has been written and said, my only justification for attempting such a project was to bring what I could from my background, and interest in literature, comparative religions and globalism, to see what they might light up in him that more serious and informed scholars of Tibet, of Buddhism, or of monasticism, hadn’t done already. But yes, I can’t pretend that I’m giving the reader anything more than my limited and, no doubt, distorted vision of the man, try though I might to cut through my own projections. My one talisman was that the Dalai Lama himself always speaks for transparency, accuracy and objectivity, so I tried as hard as I could to honour those principles, and spent five years working on the book every day, much longer than I’ve spent on any other of my works.